Editorial | Listen to survivors of gun violence

David and Francine Wheeler

Ben, his mother recalled, was a gifted boy of "boundless energy" who loved school, soccer, piano and especially adored his older brother, Nate.

"On what turned out to be the last morning of his life, Ben told me, quite out of the blue, 'I still want to be an architect, Mama, but I also want to be a paleontologist because that's what Nate is going to be and I want to do everything Nate does.' "

"My name is Francine Wheeler," the soft-spoken brunette said, her voice clear but quavering as she looked directly into the camera with her husband, David beside her. "Our younger son, Ben, age six, was murdered in his first-grade classroom on Dec. 14."

As the U.S. Senate this week takes takes up the embattled bill to reduce gun violence, its members must hear such voices from recent days including that of Mrs. Wheeler, a Connecticut woman whose son was among 20 small children slain by a disturbed gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

In an unusual move, President Barack Obama yielded his weekly, Saturday address to the nation to the Wheelers so Mrs. Wheeler could make a direct appeal for what she described as "common sense gun responsibiity reforms."

Another mother lending her voice to the debate is First Lady Michelle Obama, who last week traveled to Chicago, her hometown, to make an unusual public appeal to fight the firearm violence killing so many youths in that city.

Departing from the "safe" positions of so many first ladies - literacy, education or, in Mrs. Obama's case until now, fitness and nutrition - she waded into the national debate over firearm deaths at a meeting on youth violence.

The First Lady became tearful as she compared herself to Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old honor student gunned down in random violence in a Chicago park just a week after she returned from Washington, D.C., where she performed with her high school dance team at Mr. Obama's inauguration.

"Hadiya Pendleton was me and I was her," Mrs. Obama said. "But I got to grow up ... and have a career and family and the most blessed life I could ever imagine."

"And Hadiya? Oh we know that story. Just a week after she performed at my husband's inauguration, she went to a park with some friends and got shot in the back because some kid thought she was in a gang."

? A bereaved Connecticut mother who describes herself as "just a citizen."

? The First Lady, one of the country's most prominent women, expressing her personal sorrow over one among many needless deaths of Chicago youths.

? Former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, who survived a gunshot wound to the head, joined by her husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly, in pleading with Congress to consider reasonable safety restrictions on firearms.

Yet even as these voices grow stronger and more determined, Congress continues to waver over the bill before the Senate, which would expand background checks to end the "gun show loophole" and increase penalties for illegal gun sales.

Extreme voices in the gun lobby, led by the National Rifle Association, grow ever more shrill, insisting the Second Amendment bars any efforts to impose reasonable limits on weapons of mass destruction such as the military-style assault rifle the gunman used to kill 20 small children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary.

Even simple background checks, the NRA insists, could lead to a registry the government could use to confiscate weapons of law-abiding gun owners. Some members of Congress, cowed by such paranoid nonsense, are wavering.

But Congress must put the anguished voices of citizens above the self-interests of the gun lobby and manufacturers that support it. They should listen to Mrs. Wheeler, who spent hours of hope and terror on Dec. 14 in the small town firehouse where her son's Scout troop met, waiting to learn whether he had survived.

"I've heard people say that the tidal wave of anguish our country felt on 12/14 has receded," she said. "But not for us. To us, it feels as if it happened just yesterday. And in the four months since we lost our loved ones, thousands of other Americans have died at the end of a gun. Thousands of other families across the United States are drowning in our grief.

"Please help us do something before our tragedy becomes your tragedy."

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Editorial | Listen to survivors of gun violence

Ben, his mother recalled, was a gifted boy of 'boundless energy' who loved school, soccer, piano and especially adored his older brother, Nate.